Keep the Movies Unschooled

I was alarmed by Manohla Dargis’s suggestion, in the Times, that the Film Society of Lincoln Center should initiate young people into its cinematic culture by means of educational programs. She cites a study showing that “only 13 percent of art-house patrons are children and other full-time students,” and worries that “no cinema organization can flourish on the fumes of 1960s cinephile culture or the belief that if it just shows a worthy movie, the audience will automatically come.” Dargis recommends that the organization do outreach to students.

Of course, it’s good for kids to watch good movies, which have been common coin for our children from the time they started sitting in front of a TV screen. Of course, one of the crucial objectives of public education is to overcome incidental differences at home (not every child gets exposed to the same movies). In principle, I’m all for encouraging the habit of movie-viewing, exactly as I’m for children getting in the habit of reading good books—ones that help to cultivate a love of beauty, a sense of aesthetic delight, but, most of all, a pleasure in the very act of reading.

But exposure is one thing; school is another. The educational system runs on compulsion. Kids have to go, and they have to take part, and the school curriculum is for children what the tax code is for grownups: the government’s way of inducing preferred behavior. It’s coercive, and it comes with a built-in measure of bureaucracy—which isn’t an argument against the institution of school but a red flag regarding its instrumentalization. When my wife and I showed our daughters Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” nothing forced them to sit through it. When we tried Westerns, they told us, “No.” We didn’t coax them to write about the movies, didn’t organize discussions about them. Eventually, we chatted—or we didn’t. Our movie nights at home stayed within the realm of pleasures to share, and that may be one of the reasons why, for our daughters, those movies, and other classics that have followed, have remained pleasures. (They greeted news of the upcoming Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum as if it were a sort of monthlong holiday.)

Books and movies are different. Because of the fundamental social necessity of literacy, because of the connection between analytical reading and success at work, the very act of reading is encouraged through all sorts of schemes and ruses. The question of whether good books are being read is secondary to the effort to foster the habit of reading at all. It doesn’t come naturally. By contrast, students at any age don’t, by and large, have to be coaxed to do any watching. They’re doing it prodigiously—in fact, it’s often what they’re doing instead of reading. It’s no surprise that they’re not dropping into Film Society of Lincoln Center on the way home from school—because many of them are already watching good movies. Some are seeing “The Wolf of Wall Street”; others are seeing “Moonrise Kingdom” or “Black Swan” or “Shutter Island,” “The Social Network” or “Magic Mike,” “Marie Antoinette” or “The Bling Ring,” “Knocked Up” or “Rushmore” or “The Break-Up.” Sometimes they go to theatres; maybe they’re streaming them, because they can. But if there’s one lesson to derive from the historicist view of movies that has arisen in the past half century, it’s that the very summit of the art of cinema often shows up in brazenly commercial guises.

“Psycho” is a movie that every teen might see and enjoy, but it was the “Wolf of Wall Street” of its day. Of course, young people may not be finding it at their multiplex or their favorite, doubtless legal, streaming site. It would be great if little kids could see “Modern Times,” “The Gang’s All Here,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Pajama Game,” and, yes, “Playtime”; if bigger ones could see lots of Hitchcock, such New Wave classics as “Breathless” and “The 400 Blows,” films by Eisenstein and Kiarostami and Mankiewicz and Welles, Elaine May and Jia Zhangke—the list of possibilities is virtually endless. Two hours off; serve popcorn.

But here is a list of “education initiatives” by the San Francisco Film Society that Dargis holds up as a model for Lincoln Center:

That group’s education programs annually serve more than eleven thousand students and teachers, kindergarten through college, in order, as its Web site puts it, “to develop media literacy, cultural awareness, global understanding, and a lifelong appreciation of cinema.” Its FilmEd site offers a host of free resources, including a curriculum guide for educators; a “transmedia storyteller tool-kit guide”; filmmaking materials on how to conduct on-camera interviews and the like; and viewing guides for movies like “Fruitvale Station.” (“What is activism? Develop a working definition of activism for the class.”)

I’m already asleep, and most spirited students would be, too. These programs are designed for the dutiful, not the enthusiastic—for the formation of serious little adults all ready for the liberal art-house consensus that blends the worst of self-satisfied politics with a virtual aesthetic neutrality. (“Fruitvale Station” is a responsible, substantial film, but not an inventive one.) I’m a liberal—in politics. Art is the place to consider the most radical, perhaps unpalatable ideas. But schools aren’t the place where officials will get away with teaching the radical and the unpalatable. Rather, movies will get instrumentalized into the sort of civic and moral lessons that are the exact opposite of the cultivation of taste and passion for art.

If the American independent cinema is one of the world’s key sources of cinematic innovation, if Hollywood continues to expand its aesthetic so daringly, if hip-hop is the fundamental international musical mode of the day, it’s not because of the excellence of American musical education or the copious transmission of classical music or the history of cinema in primary schools. (There’s film school—and I had the benefit of a brilliant and inspiring professor of cinema studies, Gilberto Perez—but that’s college, when the choice of subjects is already optional.) Rather, it’s because we bathe in music and in movies long before we ever get to school. Certainly, Americans aren’t the only people who do so, but with thriving traditions and thriving industries, it’s easier to jump on and easier to jump off anywhere and strike one’s own path.

But thriving traditions (which entail a conjunction of art and business) depend upon a preponderance of crap. The undue ease of historical overview is the light skip from summit to summit, without having to traverse the muck below. The standout films of our time are burdened by association with the rest of the films of our time, from which they stand out—for some critics, perhaps not far enough. For a movie that was conceived, made, and released during the age of classic Hollywood—which Norman Mailer recalled as “a mother-in-law’s mother-in-law”—the ambient web of falsifications and outright propaganda, the sense of living in a nation-sized company town, could easily take precedence over the recognition of individual directorial achievements. It’s not an accident that the politique des auteurs, which involved the apt assessment of geniuses at work in Hollywood, arose far from Hollywood.

No, we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds, but we are living in a time when a filmmaker can make a film for a low-four-figure budget and get it seen at festivals and discussed by critics. When talented teen-agers, writing their own songs and sometimes even producing them on their own shoestring, can be heard internationally. When independent producers unleash the artistry of filmmakers formerly dependent on studios and bring about brash, dazzling masterworks.

New York’s repertory-film scene, and art-house scene, are far livelier and diverse than they were a decade ago. It’s not because of successful educational outreach; it’s because video technology and the Internet liberated production, distribution, and criticism at more or less the same time as home video and, especially, DVDs made a spontaneous and autodidactic classicism readily available. Young viewers who saw movies they loved on their computer screens found that, far from slaking their thirst for movies, their home-video consumption left them eager to see film prints of the same movies projected in public on a big screen.

In other words, what will bring young people to Film Society of Lincoln Center is the programming.

Photograph by Wayne Miller/Magnum.

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